Product Description
M.2 SSDs are some of the fastest commercially available drives out there. You'll need available M.2 spaces in your motherboard for these. Most motherboards offered here have three, but all modern motherboards have at least one. We offer three kinds of drives:
Gen4 NVMe SSDs: The fastest of the three offered, it's usually a good idea to only have one of these in your system. Most consumer processors only support 20 PCIe lanes. These devices take up 4, and graphics cards take up 16. Customers not using graphics cards can get up to five of these without any performance hits. Using one of these for your operating system, messaging apps, startup programs, and anything else you might be installing is a good idea. 256GB to 512GB in size should be enough for most people.
Gen3 NVMe SSDs: Not as fast as the Gen4 drives, but it's hardly noticable given how files load. We've kind of thrown these in because we could, and offering just Gen4 and SATA3 M.2 drives felt weird.
SATA3 M.2 SSDs: These drives mount just like the other two into an M.2 slot. The difference is they operate as fast as SATA3 SSDs, which is quite a lot slower than Gen4. However they don't use up PCIe lanes, so you can have multiple of these in your system without them affecting GPU performance.
Below is a short breakdown of what we offer and the top theoretical speeds you can expect from each drive.
WD Black SN770: Gen4 NVMe, Read: 5150MB/s. Write: 4900MB/s.
WD Black SN850: Gen4 NVMe, Read: 7000MB/s. Write: 5300MB/s.
WD Black SN850X: Gen4 NVMe, Read: 7300MB/s. Write: 6350MB/s.
Sabrent Rocket: Gen4 NVMe, Read: 5000MB/s. Write: 4400MB/s.
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus: Gen4 NVMe, Read: 7000MB/s. Write: 5300MB/s.
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G: Gen4 NVMe, Read: 7300MB/s. Write: 6000MB/s.
Crucial P3 Plus: Gen4 NVMe, Read: 5000MB/s. Write: 4200MB/s.
Crucial P5 Plus: Gen4 NVMe, Read: 6600MB/s. Write: 5000MB/s.
SK Hynix Platinum P41: Gen4 NVMe, Read: 7000MB/s. Write: 6500MB/s.
Western Digital Blue SN570: Gen3 NVMe, Read: 3500MB/s. Write: 3500MB/s.
TeamGroup MS30: SATA3, Read: 500MB/s. Write: 400MB/s.
*Samsung 980 and 990 drives are not included until a bug in their firmware can be confirmed as fixed.
(Pictured: Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G 1TB)
